Mother’s Day Gifts for Gardening Moms

Does Mom enjoy gardening? Brighten her special day with homemade gardening gifts from her children.
There is an immeasurable value in doing arts and crafts with your children. I hope parents and teachers will use the free Mother’s Day garden gift making instructions on the Crafters 4 Kids website to help children create amazing gardening gifts for Mom this Mother’s Day.

Here are just a few ideas:

Garden Kneeler: Gardening is so hard on the knees! Garden kneelers are the perfect cushion for your knees because of all the kneeling down to pull weeds and tend to the plants. Help children create this easy garden kneeler with Sunday’s newspaper and duct tape!

Painted Watering Can: Create a beautiful keepsake that will make Mom smile every time she waters her plants. Paint a metal watering can with acrylic paints. Use lines, swirls, and circles to create an easy pattern.

Wedding Ideas on a Budget

Weddings are a time to celebrate the love and devotion of two people. Weddings can be a mementos occasion without resulting in huge debt and regret. To create a wedding on a budget think of sentimental ways to celebrate the event and include your guests in the celebration.

Money Saving Tips:

DIY Wedding Projects – Make your own table centerpieces, guest book, invitations, and party favors. Designing your own invitations can be a big help to cut wedding costs. Create your invitations and invite guest to bring a photo of you and them together to place inside of the guest book. Guests can place the photo along with a caption in the guest book and your guest book can double as your first family album. For more information about DIY Wedding project ideas visit Bowdabrablog.com and Bowdabra.com

Spring Break Frugal Activities and Crafts for Kids

Spring Break is just around the corner; a week spent with children home from school looking for ways to have fun and be creative. As a parent you want their time spent at home to be quality family time. Plan fun frugal activities ahead of time so that when those adorable faces are staring at you begging for something to do you have a game plan.

1. Visit Crafters 4 Kids Online (http://c4k555.org)-  We have some creative frugal kids’ crafts that do not require a lot of time or craft materials. For instance, make a pet mouse using a rock, pipe cleaners, googley eyes, and a pom pom nose. Children can even take it a step further and design some fake cheese or even make a tiny shoebox home.

Do It Yourself: Spring Salsa Recipe

Searching for the perfect springtime recipe: Citrus Salsa!  The salsa has all my favorite springtime colors and tastes great.

I placed half of the salsa that I made into a canning jar and will be giving it as a hostess gift. The other half I will be putting out with chips for an appetizer before Easter dinner.

Perfect Spring Gift That Kids Can Make

It is just a matter of months before gardens will be in full bloom. Many of us have started seedlings indoors but what to do with all those extra seeds? Seed packets often come with way more seeds than the average gardener really needs. Why not give those extra seeds as gifts?

Skull & Bones Trendy Hair Bow

Crafters 4 Kids has some cute felt skull teen crafts!  Those creative crafters over at Crafters 4 Kids made a ribbon belt with felt skull and a felt skull key chain.  We were so inspired by their teen felt skull crafts we designed a felt skull for the centerpiece of one of our hair bows.

 

Inspired to create your own Skull & Bones hair bow? Head to Sandy Sandler's blog for the step-by-step instructions. Here's the link: Skull & Bones Trendy Hair Bow

Let's get crafty!

How to Make a Ribbon Belt with Matching Hair Bow

We at Bowdabra love Crafters 4 Kids!  Crafters 4 Kids is a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing arts and crafts to children and teens.  For National Craft Month, Crafters 4 Kids provided a free tutorial for making a ribbon belt.  To download the free step-by-step picture tutorial click here.  We thought the project was so cool so we decided to make our own ribbon belt and add a matching hair bow!

How to Recycle a Tropicana Carton for an Easter Basket

I love to reuse and recycle and find new and exciting ways to use something that would have been otherwise trash.  I transformed a Tropicana Carton into an Easter Basket as shown in the photo below. Cute isn't it? Wants to find out how you can do it yourself? For the easy-to-follow step by step instructions, simply click on the following link: "How to Recycle a Tropicana Carton for an Easter Basket "

Woven Ribbon Notebook Hair Bow Holder

We love the Ribbon Notebook at Crafters 4 Kids!  Adding woven ribbon to a notebook, textbook, or binder is a really fun way to jazz up otherwise boring school stuff!  We here at Bowdabra decided to follow Crafters 4 Kids step-by-step picture tutorial to make our very own notebook.  However, we decided to take it one step further and add hair bows to the woven ribbon.  This craft will make the perfect Easter gift: a notebook, to use as a journal, that also holds your hair bows, genius!

How to Make a Braided Ribbon Headband

I wanted to design a headband for my daughter.  My daughter is young and very particular on what she puts in her hair, her main concern is comfort.  So I knew that the headband had to be comfortable especially behind her ears.  I spent a lot of time designing it so that the ends of the headband with tucked into each other and there was no sharp edges.

How to Line Snap Clips with Ribbon for Mini Bowdabra Hair Bows

Coordinate outfits with matching hair bows. Use the Mini Bowdabra Hair Bow Tool & Ruler to make easy hair bows to match all of your daughter’s clothes. The Hair Bow Tool & Ruler comes with interactive software to make 70 different hair bow styles. The interactive software gives step-by-step instructions with pictures, an easy to follow material list, a ribbon length chart for all standard bows, helpful hints, and frequently asked hair bow making questions.

Chalkboard with Magnets: Perfect for Dorm Rooms or Lockers

Why paint wood when you can finish it with beautiful colorful ribbon! We embellished a chalkboard with ribbon and then added handmade magnets to the top of the chalkboard.  Friends can leave messages or attach notes.  The chalkboard with magnets is perfect for lockers, dorm rooms, or hang on child’s bedroom door and parents and siblings can leave encouraging notes every day.

Make Your Own Envelope and Card

Need a last minute birthday card with envelope?  Want to make your own thank you cards?  Use our attached pattern to make your own envelope with card.  Use cardstock and ribbon to make a card and envelope for any occasion.  This is a perfect craft for both children and adults.

St. Patrick’s Day Kids Crafts

St. Patrick’s Day is a holiday filled with magical fun for children. We designed several easy crafts that would be great to make in the classroom, for classroom parties, crafts for home-schoolers, or just a fun afternoon of “craft time” with a parent.

• Create a Leprechaun Snack Cup with cardstock and a small plastic cup. Attach cardstock around a small plastic cup and hold it in place with tape. Add a circular bottom to the plastic cup to form the Leprechaun’s Hat. Finish the hat with ribbon or marker. Children can then use the Leprechaun’s hat to hold their snack.  Optional:  Add a little clover on the side of the hat made with a green chenille stem.

How to Make a Diaper Wreath Using the Bowdabra

A baby shower decoration that can also be used once the baby is born- awesome! I designed this decorative diaper wreath so that it can easily be taken apart after the shower and the infant diapers can be used. Diapers are so expensive it seems a shame to waste even one.

St. Patrick’s Day Frame - Kid’s Project

Who says wood has to be painted?  How about covering wooden shapes with aluminum foil! It is easy and fun for kids.  I love all of the wood cut-out shapes that are available.  They are a fairly inexpensive craft item and come in a variety of shapes.  However, as a parent of young children I don’t always want to break-out the paints when we are crafting.  Sometimes it is nice to just have a simple almost mess-free craft.

Use Bowdabra Bow Wire When Making Tulle Flowers

 

Tulle is a neat ribbon to work with it. It is very lightweight, looks great stacked, and bends easily. I like working with tulle especially when it comes to making flowers. I have designed simple to make tulle flowers with a large pin center. The flowers can be placed into Styrofoam circles, blocks, discs, or wreath forms.

Tissue Paper Pom Poms

Have you seen the tissue paper pom poms that Martha Stewart has on her site? I love the look of them! Today, I experimented with my Bowdabra® to see if the tissue paper pom poms were something that I could make quicker and simpler with my Bowdabra®.

More Valentine’s Day Gifts for Pets

There are quite a few craft ideas for toys for pets on the Crafters 4 Kids website. Today, I am going to introduce you to some more cute crafting ideas for your pets. These are not toys like the crafts that were in last week’s post, but they are more adorable ideas for gifts for your pet – or pets! – for Valentine’s day. They are easy enough for you to sit down and craft with your children and they won’t cost much to create, either, so it’s a win-win-win situation for everyone!

Valentine’s Day Recipes for Kids

With every holiday comes millions of recipes, and Valentine’s Day is no different! I’ve gathered some recipes for you and your kids to enjoy this Valentine’s Day…they’re made with the colors of Valentine’s, they’re easy for kids to make and they’re yummy to eat, too!

 Valentine’s Sugar Cookies
*Package of pre-made sugar cookie dough
*frosting in pink, red and white
*red, pink and white sprinkles
*red hots
*any other Valentine’s colored decor for cookies
This is really simple – basically, just bake the cookies and then let them cool. (You could use a cookie cutter to make them heart-shaped if you would like.) Then, you and the children can decorate to your *heart’s* content. Help the children frost the cookies and then let them add the decorations that they desire.

For more delicious Valentine's day recipes, please read the full article Valentine's Day Recipes for Kids.

About the Author

Sandy Sandler is founder of non-profit Crafters 4 Kids and creator of the QVC best-seller, the Bowdabra. Her frugal craft projects and activity ideas are designed to transform the creatively-challenged into creative pros. Sandy’s focus is on creative and easy projects that parents can do with their kids and that kids can even do on their own that are both frugal and green in nature. Crafters 4 Kids focuses on projects that can be done under 5 minutes and under $5. Visit www.C4K555.org. Contact Sandy at jaimevivre@mac.com